How to become a samba queen?

Passista (comes from the Portuguese word passiar - meaning to walk) is a solo samba dancer and one of the key members of the samba school. In the samba carnival the passistas wear the most elaborate bikini costumes and commonly dance in front of the samba band, bateria. Only a handful of the best dancers are chosen as passistas and one of them, the best of the best, is furthermore chosen as the rainha de bateria. Rainha is the queen of the bateria who will dance in the carnival parade right in front of the bateria and is considered as the "leader" of the passistas. Passistas are chosen for one year at a time and each aspiring dancer have to audition for the part no matter how experienced they are.

Last Saturday I went to see the annual passista exams at the Helsinki samba school Império do Papagaio. The passista exams are in fact one of the most anticipated samba events of the year (the carnival is obviously the most anticipated event). A panel of judges, typically former passistas and merited sambistas, evaluate the dancers that perform an improvised dance in small groups as well as individually to the live drumming of the bateria - and in front of a large crowd of fellow samba dancers. To be chosen as a passista you not only need to have excellent skills in samba no pé and be familiar with dancing to the beat of the live bateria but you should also have charisma, musicality, a big smile.... and don't be afraid to dance in a very revealing costume!

Best moments of IZFM 2013

A few weeks have passed since Sep 21st and the International Zouk Flash Mob 2013. What a great idea it is to unite the world with dance! And unite it did: thousands of dancers in altogether 127 cities in 43 countries took part in the flash mob. The list includes such landmark places as New York, LA, Miami, Toronto,  Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Rome, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Athens, Moscow, Dubai, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Tokyo, Mumbai,.... but also some even more exotic locations like Fortaleza (Brazil), Flagstaff (USA), Stavanger (Norway), Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Minsk (Belarus), Irkutsk (Russia), Astana (Kazakhstan), Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine), Beirut (Lebanon), Muscat (Oman) and Chiang Mai (Thailand) -- just to name a few! The tremendous work of numerous volunteers to make this event happen made it into a success story in a global scale.

Below is a compilation video of the event. Credits of the video go to the IZFM management team, all the coordinators and dancers that were involved all over the world as well as Swageberg Productions that edited this video. The true scale of this event is really captured in this video - despite the fact that many cities that performed the flash mob could not be included in the video it is still quite impressive!!

Expanding my dance wear collection...

Over the past couple months I've been working hard on creating some fun new print designs for all kind of clothing and accessories. One can never have too much clothes, am I right!!? So go ahead and visit the Dance the World shop!

As before, in case you want to make a group order for your team and want the graphics in a certain color or with a custom text that can all be arranged, just comment on this post and I'll get back to you.

The shirts, printing, delivery & payment is done by great printing company in Germany, Spreadshirt so if you have questions about them look up their Help section. Prices are pretty reasonable and I've liked the quality of the shirts before so can recommend them. Deliveries are available to all over Europe, US and Japan.